All posts tagged sucralose

Sugar has become one of the biggest nutritional villains for many parents choosing food for their children. But even companies cutting the sweet stuff sometimes need to do so stealthily — not only because of concerns about altering the taste, but also because of worries about what to replace it with.

Nestle has been slowly reducing the sugar content of its Nesquik ready-to-drink chocolate milk beverages for almost a decade — bringing down the amount of added sugar by a total of at least 25% for all the products. Prior to 2005, for example, its standard chocolate low-fat milk contained 17 grams of added sugar per 8-ounce serving. Now, the drink has 12.5 grams of added sugar — giving it 24 grams total after including the natural sugar present in milk — and the company is aiming to lower the amount to 10.6 grams by year-end, with further reductions after that.

Even if mothers appreciate that a product contains less sugar, kids aren’t going to consume it if it doesn’t taste good. To keep it sweet, companies sometimes substitute artificial sweeteners like sucralose, which Nestle includes in its no-sugar-added version of chocolate Nesquik.